Random Lace

Over the last year or so, I have become interested in random lace, that is lace knitted without a planned sequence of stitches.  I have a couple of random lace projects on the go.  One, I started months ago, where I did a yo and accompanying k2tog every time any person’s name was mentioned in my audiobook version of Pride and Prejudice. While it is not actually random, it is close enough. I only got a few rows into that project when I started listening to other audiobooks, and the project got set aside.

Recently, I started a side to side, long triangle where, between the edge stitches, I randomly knit yo with paired decreases (k2tog, ssk, and cdd) with 0 to 3 knit stitches between the yo’s. The yo’s and their decreases are not necessarily beside one another.

Well over a year ago, I signed up for and watched Myra Wood’s Craftsy class, The Perfect Fit Seamless Crazy Lace Cardigan. While I learned a lot in the class and did enjoy it, I did not get what I had really wanted from it: Myra’s take on random lace that she introduced in her book Crazy Lace. That book is unfortunately out of print with no plans for a reprint. You can get copies (as you saw if you clicked on the link above), but almost all of them are over $100.00! After hmmming and hawing for all this time, I ordered the book through Inter-Library Loans and a few days ago it arrived!

I enjoyed reading through it and learning some great new stuff. Myra goes gently for those who are new to lace or new to playing with patterns. As I am neither and one of my joys is creating lace patterns rather than just finding ones in books (though I do that too),  I thought that I could just skip most of the first parts of the book. Boy am I glad I did not!

On page 32, Myra says gives a synopsis of the various ways of increasing, focussing on the yarn over, including double and triple yos, dropped on the next row. What was new for me is that she also gives directions for opening up earlier yos by knitting into them on subsequent rows. This is a great technique.

These techniques got me thinking and I started playing with reverse yo’s. These (when purled through the front loop on the next row) create smaller holes than do regular yo’s. Alternatively, doing a regular yo on one row and then purling through the back on the next row will give the same effect.

This page is probably the most unique contribution to my lace knitting knowledge, though there are many other, very valuable tips and interesting facts about lace that I have seen elsewhere. However, I always find that these things bear repetition and it is always valuable to have them said in a different way. It is a great book and if it were more readily available at a reasonable price, I would absolutely buy it.

UPDATE: Crazy Lace is now available for Kindle at Amazon.com. Unfortunately, it is NOT available on Amazon.ca.